GOPers Top Pork List

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Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that regularly decries government spending, has released a database of the $15.9 billion in earmarks—those special projects slipped into the budget by legislators without votes—for fiscal year 2010. And the group has tagged the top porkers in the Senate and the House: Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young of Florida. Both are Republicans, and each is the senior GOPer on the defense appropriations subcommittee of his chamber. Cochran cooked up $500 million in bacon, with 242 earmarks; Young, $90.45 million, with 41 earmarks. They really show that the GOP is the party of spending discipline. Will Sen. John McCain send out a tweet denouncing them?

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David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief and an on-air analyst for MSNBC. He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff) of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, Showdown, Hubris (with Isikoff), and The Lies of George W. Bush, as well as the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter and Facebook.